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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25047448">breathe, believe</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiss/pseuds/Tiss'>Tiss</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>It Takes a City [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Final Fantasy XV</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Brief Alcohol Mention, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, M/M, Mild Gore, Noctis Lives, Post-Game(s), Pre-Relationship, callous mention of religion?, it's just the first paragraph</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:47:30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,816</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25047448</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiss/pseuds/Tiss</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Gladio isn’t very good at blind faith, but he’s plenty good at duty.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Or, Noctis won’t wake up after the Dawn rises, and Gladio waits. Life goes on around them.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Gladiolus Amicitia &amp; Noctis Lucis Caelum, Gladiolus Amicitia/Noctis Lucis Caelum</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>It Takes a City [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1788979</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>58</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>breathe, believe</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title from <i>Loud Like Love</i> by Placebo.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Gladio has nightmares, the first few days. Nightmares where Noct isn’t breathing when Gladio comes up to the throne. Nightmares where Noct’s old sword is sticking out of his gut, and Gladio has to pull it out of him, look at the congealed blood smeared on the metal, feel Noct’s deadweight lean on him, cold and slowly stiffening. Nightmares where he comes up to the throne, and Noct looks at him with a dead man’s bloated face and a bloody hole gaping in his chest and asks him, “Why? Why didn’t you die first, Gladio?”</p>
<p>He doesn’t get a whole lot of sleep.</p>
<p>It’s not like he seeks it much, anyway. Noctis is asleep and won’t wake up, and his breathing is shallow, and his skin is pale, and he doesn’t thrash or speak or move at all, really. There don’t seem to be any wounds, and they can’t tell if there’s internal damage because the old hospital in Lestallum doesn’t have the equipment for that. Gladio forces himself to leave Noct’s room to eat and clean himself up and give orders to the Crownsguard, and then forces himself to go back in. Every time night falls, he forgets it’s going to end in a few hours.</p>
<p>Most of the time, he passes out in a chair next to Noct’s bed. He’s more used to that than he’d like to admit – the passing out in a chair part. Most of the time, Ignis shakes him awake and tells him to go find a bed, that he’ll watch over Noct in the meantime. He’s used to being woken like that, too, to an extent – there was a couple years where all three of them, he and Ig and Prom, worked as an actual team – mostly by necessity, but they’d worked together well. There had been little to hold them together without Noct except for work and survival, but they’d kept each other alive. They have that much between them, at least.</p>
<p>Noctis sleeps for six days.</p>
<p>While he sleeps, the city adjusts.</p>
<p>The entire first day, the people celebrate. Booze stashes are cracked all over, and Gladio can hear the drunken cheering and singing from his bedside post. Someone jumps from a building and breaks a leg and an ankle; Gladio hears about <em>that </em>from the Crownsguard. Once the sun sets, people get rowdy; some start to cry. There’s crying again when it comes back up, but of a different kind. Gladio can sympathize.</p>
<p>He gets about an hour of nightmare-addled sleep, right between one and two o’clock at night, and feels his heart vanish from his body somewhere to the frigid depths of the Ghorovas Rift when he wakes up and it’s still dark outside.</p>
<p>But the commotion dies down eventually, over several days. His vigil over Noctis’ bed becomes monotonous, barring visits from Ignis, and he dozes a lot, eyes half-open, without really dreaming. Nighttime still makes him a bit queasy, but the nightmares start repeating, and he begins to get used to them.</p>
<p>When he jokes that he’s lost his main source of entertainment now that he’s not getting a new horror show every night, Ignis looks at him strangely, but offers to bring him a book. Gladio says no, it’s fine. It feels awkward, asking anything of Ignis after so many years of barely seeing him.</p>
<p>Ignis is, in general, more rational about this whole Noct thing. He only comes from time to time, even though he’s probably at loose ends too, now that the daemons are gone, and has a standing arrangement with the nurse to be notified immediately when Noctis wakes up. It seems a bit strange to Gladio that he isn’t hovering over Noct’s bed like a mama bird, but Ignis can put up a façade with the best of them. He’s probably compartmentalized the whole thing and is trying to behave like a proper, rational human being.</p>
<p>Gladio just – has nowhere else to be. Like a dog. There’s no other place for him right now except at Noct’s side.</p>
<p>So he waits.</p>
<p>He’s waited ten years, he can wait a little longer.</p>
<p>It wasn’t any proper kind of waiting, though, not like Ignis’. Among the three of them, Ignis, weirdly enough, is the most optimistic, in Gladio’s mind. At least in this; this – thing, where you know nothing and have no way of learning anything, and all you can really have is blind faith. Or maybe, Ignis can pull himself together so well <em>because</em> it’s about Noct, and the only other option is to descend into despair.</p>
<p>It’s different for Gladio. Whether Noct was coming back or not, Gladio has always been a Crownsguard; he was born and raised as one, a noble by lineage and a Shield by legacy and his own merit. He has duty in his blood. He can do it whether his liege is there or not, and he can function just fine.</p>
<p>Can’t he?</p>
<p>Ignis was nobility too, back when that sort of thing still mattered. Maybe it’s about something else, after all.</p>
<p>Prompto, that human pit of well-contained anxiety, doesn’t show up at all.</p>
<p>“What’s Prompto up to?” Gladio asks the next time Ignis comes to visit. Ignis pauses in adjusting the bedsheets and tilts his head marginally in Gladio’s direction. It’s a warning, this pause.</p>
<p>Gladio doesn’t mean anything by it, really. He’s just – wondering.</p>
<p>“Worrying, mostly,” Ignis admits, going back to his fussing. “Trying to distract himself by helping others. A lot of people are quite shaken up by the recent change.”</p>
<p>He makes an assenting noise for Ignis’ benefit.</p>
<p>Ignis eventually kicks him out, and he makes his rounds between the Crownsguard base and his own quarters. It’s a good thing he doesn’t need to go outside much to do that: there’s dried vomit in so many corners, his own throat feels stripped raw. There hasn’t been rain in ten years; the cleaners will have to wash it down. It takes Gladio a moment to even consider the possibility of rain, and then he looks up at the sky without thinking.</p>
<p>Blue.</p>
<p>He stands there like an idiot for what is probably a full minute, just staring upwards.</p>
<p>On his way back to the hospital, he spots some woman sitting on a building’s steps, face tilted up to the sun.</p>
<p>He realizes he’s <em>hopeful</em>, truly hopeful, after so many years.</p>
<p>It’s a nice feeling.</p>
<p>When he sits back down in his usual chair in Noct’s room, still riding the last dregs of that surge of hope, he notices Ignis’ lips twitch. He’d swear that the man has recovered his eyesight in secret and is now pulling a long one on all of them, but even Gladio is not that much of an ass.</p>
<p>Or maybe he’s gained some other sight instead. Huh. Wouldn’t that be a riot. There’s gotta be <em>something</em> that helps him fight like he does.</p>
<p>Ignis leaves soon after, and Gladio gives Noct’s sleeping form a once-over for any sign of waking. There are none that he can see, but what would he know. He’s still asleep. He hasn’t moved. His face hasn’t changed, other than to lose the stubble that had been growing in. Ignis must have shaved him while Gladio was gone. He must have kicked Gladio out on purpose, the wily bastard, because Gladio would absolutely have blown a gasket if he’d been there to see a blind man put a razor to Noct’s face. At least it must’ve been an electric razor, going by the dark pinpricks of hair left on Noct’s chin; small mercies.</p>
<p>It had been a bit of a shock to see Noct with a beard, but now that Gladio can see him without it, it dawns on him that Noct’s face is different enough underneath to be a shock of its own. His jaw is wider, nose thicker, eyebrows heavier – those have smoothed out a bit in unconsciousness, but still. There’s a maturity and masculinity in that face that makes it almost unrecognizable, but Noct looks younger than any of them all the same. There are no lines, no scars except for the fading mosaic on the right side and on Noct’s right arm, all the way up to the elbow: a strange pattern like a lightning strike, or cracked dirt after a hot day, but not quite. It had already been faint when the three of them took him from that throne, and it’s been growing fainter by the day. Maybe when the marks disappear completely, Noct will finally wake up. Maybe.</p>
<p>He hates being in the dark, now in more ways than one. Gods, but he hates this.</p>
<p>There’s a shiny pink scar like a weeks-old burn around the base of the middle finger on Noct’s scarred hand, where the ring used to sit. Nobody knows where that thing went. A Glaive scoured what remains of the throne room in the aftermath and got nada. He brought back news instead: that the Crystal is now a layer of sparkly shards coating the entirety of the throne room floor. Gladio had called his sword to him as soon as he got the report from Cor, but, like the Glaive, got nada. Then Ignis had mentioned his own lack of recent success with the elements, and Gladio began to wonder if maybe all Lucian magic was gone, and what it would mean for Noct if it was. If maybe it wasn’t just the Lucian magic.</p>
<p>He doesn’t know enough about magic to make conclusions right now. That’s just fact.</p>
<p>He looks at Noct and marvels, not for the first time, how magic had kept him alive and healthy, if not exactly groomed, during the ten years when the rest of the world was slowly succumbing to disease and famine and vitamin D deficiency. If Gladio was a better man, a simpler man, he’d resent a king who didn’t know his people’s suffering firsthand, but he has the privilege of his pledge to put Noct above everything and be glad. It’s not something he could’ve thought ten years ago, about Noct or his own principles, but Gladio is not that idealistic boy anymore. He’s glad, overwhelmingly so, that Noctis was spared the horrors of an apocalypse. Even if he hasn’t woken up yet. He will.</p>
<p>If there’s anything Gladio absolutely has to make himself believe, it’s that.</p>
<p>And Gladio doesn’t find believing easy. He’s suspicious by occupation, yes, but this is a different kind of belief. This is blind faith; this is akin to religion. He took a history of religion class in university, he has some idea how it works. The way people waited for their king to return was eerily similar to the way some older cults waited for a messiah, a holy man who would deliver them to prosperity, be it by a flick of his wrist or the will of the gods or a selfless sacrifice.</p>
<p>Fuck.</p>
<p>He can’t think about sacrifices.</p>
<p>Anyway. The fact of the matter is, even if Gladio wants to believe, it’s not that easy. He was raised on duty and honor, and those have nothing to do with believing: it’s about doing what you must in spite of anything you might think. Belief, in Gladio’s line of work, is pretty much useless. King Regis and Gladio’s dad had only had the vaguest of explanations for what the Chosen King was supposed to do, and so Gladio used to think, like all of them in the know, that Noctis would ascend the throne and finish that damn war for good – with military tactics, or diplomacy, or some other earthly means. He got to see the Astrals with his own eyes, bedtime stories come alive, but he hadn’t <em>realized </em>what it would mean for Noct. It had been too surreal to tie into reality.</p>
<p>It isn’t easy for Gladio to believe, and his belief had turned into dumb momentum only a few years in, and all he had was duty to a king whose body hadn’t been found.</p>
<p>A king, because if he’d thought about Noctis as a friend, as Noct, during that time, Gladio would have lost it.</p>
<p>The thing is, Gladio is not an optimist. He’s just a guy of good enough breeding and a large enough stature that most problems in life give him a wide berth. He knows exactly what levers he can push to turn a situation in his favor, when a joke and a smile would suffice, when he needs to square his shoulders, when he needs to pull rank, when he has to reach for his sword. Most of it is intuitive by now.</p>
<p>Faced with a situation in which there are no levers, no action to take, nothing he can do to change anything, he was lost. He is now, too, all over again.</p>
<p>All he can do is wait. For a return, for a confirmation, for an awakening. He has to see it to believe it. Until then, he is in no man’s land, and for all that he hates it, he’d rather be here than in front of a tomb.</p>
<p>He sits by the bedside. Noctis breathes and doesn’t move.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>…</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When he finally does, it’s to turn his head away from the setting sun.</p>
<p>Noct grunts softly, with confusion, and when Gladio looks up in surprise, he sees Noct’s lashes flicker.</p>
<p>Gladio’s out of his seat with a clatter.</p>
<p>“Hey,” he says, aiming for soothing but ending up somewhere between that and anxious, and he’s hovering over Noctis before he realizes he’s moved. “Noct?”</p>
<p>Noctis squints at him blearily for a moment, not exactly focused, and then his eyes slowly fall shut again.</p>
<p>Gladio holds his own breath to listen for Noct’s, and when it comes steady, he heaves a relieved sigh and leans back.</p>
<p>Then he steps out and calls Ignis.</p>
<p>There’s nothing to do but wait for Noct to wake up again, apparently, and hope he’s more lucid the next time around, but it’s a good sign. Ignis makes his way over anyway. They sit on either side of Noct and trade news in hushed voices, and Gladio finds that the waiting is not quite as unbearable now that there’s an end in sight. If Noct’s woken up once, he can do it again.</p>
<p>He does, a few hours later, just opens his eyes at some point, and even Ignis startles because he hadn’t noticed Noct’s breathing pattern change. Gladio just glances over at Noct to check, sees him awake, and shoots out of his chair for the second time that day. For a few moments, Noctis stares blankly ahead, then cuts his eyes to Gladio and keeps staring, like he doesn’t recognize him and doesn’t really care, and somehow, Gladio can’t bring himself to say a word, despite Ignis’ questions. The apathy on Noct’s face is eerie where he’d expected disorientation, and words die in Gladio’s mouth.</p>
<p>In the end, he breathes, “Noct,” because Ignis needs to know, but he isn’t talking to Ignis.</p>
<p>Noct, in a voice hoarse with disuse and cracking with dryness, asks, evenly,</p>
<p>“Am I dead yet?”</p>
<p>Gladio doesn’t know how to say “No,” and have Noct believe it. He has an unfounded, but distinct suspicion that he won’t.</p>
<p>“No,” says Ignis, “although we were afraid you’d come quite close.” He’s smiling, for all that his tone is as dry as Noct’s throat probably is. Gladio fills a plastic cup from a water bottle at the bedside table.</p>
<p>“Hey,” Noct says to Ignis, and then smiles faintly at them both. He takes the cup and sips. The uncanny feeling slowly filters out of Gladio’s awareness, and he dismisses what remains. Who knows what dreams Noct had been seeing all that time.</p>
<p>“It’s good to see you awake, Noct,” Ignis says. “How do you feel?”</p>
<p>“Like I swallowed a kitchen mixer and someone turned it on,” Noct replies, deadpan.</p>
<p>Gladio snorts into his hand. He’s honestly surprised to hear himself do that. He realizes, with a start, that he hadn’t laughed unintentionally a very long time.</p>
<p>“Gladio, really,” says Ignis in a chiding tone.</p>
<p>“It’s fine,” Noctis speaks with a smile. He seems relaxed in a different way now, less exhausted. “Where’s Prom?”</p>
<p>“Should be on his way.”</p>
<p>Gladio lets the two of them to the talking, lets Ignis explain what had happened and what they know. He doesn’t feel like speaking right now; it’s a bit of a struggle just to keep his eyelids apart. He realizes he’s crashing, now that the worst is over. Oh well. He’d wanted to look at Noct some more, see him move and talk and be okay, but Noct probably won’t be going anywhere just yet, and</p>
<p>besides, they’d wake him, wouldn’t they</p>
<p>it’s so strange</p>
<p>         to let himself sleep when Noct’s awake</p>
<p>   Noct’s okay</p>
<p> </p>
<p>                  he can take a nap</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
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